The Open Source Center, an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, "provides foreign media reporting and analysis to policymakers, government institutions and strategic partners," Its website explains. That media has typically included "openly available information [i]nclud[ing] the Internet, databases, press, radio, television, video, geospatial data, photos and commercial imagery."

For some time now, spooks have been coming jihadi websites for clues into their activities. In a recent speech, Doug Naquin, the Center's Director, said he's taking things even further than that:

We're looking now at YouTube, which carries some unique and honest-to-goodness intelligence... We're looking at chat rooms and things that didn't even exist five years ago... We have groups looking at what they call 'Citizens Media': people taking pictures with their cell phones and posting them on the Internet. Then there's Social Media, phenomena like MySpace and blogs.... A couple years back we identified Iranian blogs as a phenomenon worthy of more attention, about six months ahead of anybody else.